Sisters on a Scavenger Hunt

Yesterday I met with my sister for our first trail run. She had picked out a 3 mile loop through the Green Belt in Staten Island and invited me along. I told her that we had to get all the pics for the Scavenger Hunt.

It started out nice. We plucked along. I thought I could use this

or this

as something pretty.

We got passed by some other runners. Running is healthy, so I snapped a pic:

Then we came around a turn and saw this:

It wasn't a pond, just a huge puddle. We didn't think much of it at the time.

Close by was this guy was hanging out on the trail. He's a living creature, so:

We stopped a few minutes later to water the dog and were immediatly swarmed by mosquitos. This was our first sign of trouble. We started moving again and that's when we hit mud. Thick deep mud. Some patches we could get around okay but other places there was no choice but to go through it. The worst part was that when we slowed down to get through it, the mosquitos would start chowing down.

We paused briefly for something loud:

It's a cicada. They were everywhere and had no problem flying directly into the side of your head.

Something tall:

You can't really tell, but this was the roots of a tree that had come down during Sandy. Btw, I'm six feet tall so this thing was HUGE.

About 1.25 miles from the end of our run, it got a little much. We were tired but spurred on by the mosquitos. All thoughts of the hunt had left our minds. Even the dog, it seemed was ready to be out of the woods.

Right by the end of the trail, S pointed out a dead mole and we both shouted, "Something ugly!"

Then we were done. We took our sweaty pictures.

And then tried to get a pic of how muddy we were.

And even though the mud and the mosquitos had made us work, we both agreed it was a great run! We can't wait to hit the trails again! (But this time with bug spray)

Afterwards, we realized that we had totally missed like half the list but we tried. We got our nails done and took a pic for our something purple but it doesn't count cause we were done running. Oh well. Here it is anyway.

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